Back in journalism school, one golden rule was hammered into our heads: don't let bias seep into your reporting. Our opinions and preferences had no place in good journalism: we were to report "just the facts," and to allow our audience to develop their own interpretation of those facts.
Given that we now live in the age of misinformation, I feel qualified, as a journalism grad, to offer this flowchart as to whether your preferred media source is biased or not.
It is still not, to my knowledge, taught in journalism school that "objectivity" is bullshit, and that there is no such thing as "unbiased" news. The mainstream media still holds these concepts in high regard, and as a result, much of the country believes that "unbiased" news is actually a thing, and gets furious when they detect bias in a work of journalism.
This has some disturbing implications for how our society operates, so it’s worth looking at the concept of bias a bit more closely.
What is bias?
Bias, in short, is prejudice. Prejudice does not need to be against a certain type of people, (though it often is) it can also be against things and ideas. Most of us have been taught that prejudice is a bad thing, and when it's against broad groups of people -- say a race, a religion, or an ethnicity -- it is! But you can also be prejudiced against, say, people who punch children in the face. That, many of us would argue, is a good type of prejudice. (But making that argument is in itself an act of bias — the kidpuncher lobby will be furious with you.)
Prejudice is inescapable because you're a human being. Human beings occupy a specific place in both space and time, and must see from where they stand. You cannot escape or transcend this fact -- all of your thoughts and opinions are influenced by a lifetime of experience: your body, your mind, your personal history, your family, your religious background, your culture, your gender, your ethnicity, your sexual orientation, your economic background, the time in which you live, and literally anything and everything else that has borne any sort of influence on you in your life.
There is no way to extricate yourself from that web -- you in a different time or place or body is a different you, and would not think or feel the same things. Any attempt to transcend your context and view things from some Godlike perch on high is a) inevitably going to be biased towards people like you, because you’re not fucking god, and b) is like, the textbook definition of hubris.
In spite of this, most of us like to still imagine that there is some greater objective moral truth. And maybe there is! Maybe someday we'll crack the code and figure out which religion is "right"! Or discover the formula for truth! But the current reality is that humans have never agreed completely on what is right and what is wrong.
“With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”
Let's take an easy example: Killing is bad. You probably believe this. You also probably believe that there are times when it is right to kill people. You may be one of the millions of Americans who believe that the bombing of Hiroshima was justified. You may believe that "freedom fighters" in the land of your choice -- Ireland, Palestine, Syria, Revolutionary America, 1980's Afghanistan but definitely not 21st century Afghanistan -- are justified in killing if it means protecting their interests. You may believe that it's right to kill someone in self-defense. Or you may be a pacifist! Or you believe that all killing is good and that we should just Squid Game each other until only one dominant human remains!
Regardless of what your exact opinion is, it is likely not shared by most people. Most people will have a qualm with at least one aspect of your opinion. And with no consensus on this fundamental moral question, there can be no "objective" correct take. Anyone claiming to have the correct take is claiming to either be a God, and just know, or is taking a side, and as such, is being biased.
I would argue that if someone claims to be God, you should cross to the other side of the street, but none of us blink when the entire journalistic establishment makes this claim.
This does not mean that journalists can't be fair. Fairness is much more simple: if you're writing a story about specific people, you give them a chance to speak for themselves. A good example of a "fair" piece of journalism is the OG true crime podcast, the first season of Serial.
In it, the interviewer Sarah Koenig gave everyone involved in the story a chance to give their side. Adnan Syed, the convicted murderer; his friend Jay, who implicated him; the investigators; friends and families. It was not, of course, perfect fairness: the murder victim Hae Min Lee was not able to give her side of the story, but Sarah Koenig allowed everyone she reasonably could a chance to speak (or to decline to speak).
But does that mean that Serial doesn't have a bias? Absolutely not. Koenig regularly gave her opinions throughout the course of the podcast, and in the end, had conclusions about the case. Her conclusions, and, it appears, her intentions in covering the story, had less to do with the "Whodunnit?" aspect of the murder case, and much more to do with the inner workings of the American justice system, which she viewed as shockingly flawed. She later went back to this topic with the (much less listened to but still pretty fucking great) third season of the show, in which she spent months in a single courthouse in Cleveland dissecting the day-to-day business of sending people to jail.
Just because Koenig was not for or against a specific perpetrator does not mean that she was not biased. It just means her viewpoint was focused on something else. And this is the lesson: all narrators, even when they are in the third person, are telling a story from a viewpoint. If there's no story, it's just data.
Data can be biased
This might make you ask: well, why don't reporters just give data? The simple answer is: we are not computers! We are humans! And human brains don’t work that way — they receive an enormous amount of data all the time, and language and stories are the mechanisms that the brain has developed for organizing that data in an understandable way.
Even if newspapers were to switch to just posting graphs and tables, it wouldn’t fix anything, because even data can be biased. An example:
I used to work for an immigration non-profit, and whenever the anti-immigrant groups wanted to convince people how bad immigrants were for America, they would release a set of numbers: this, they would say, is how much immigrants are costing America. And what would follow would be a list of things that immigrants did that cost taxpayers money. Schools, healthcare, criminal justice system: all tallied up neatly to a big ol' number that made it clear: immigrants are bad! If that data was accurate (it wasn’t) it would seem to be solid proof that we should try to reduce immigration to the US.
Of course, that wasn't the only data. Our organization would then release our own set of data, which would tabulate the amount of money immigrants paid in taxes and contributed to economic growth, arguing that the anti-immigrant groups were basically showing a bank account with only the withdrawals and none of the deposits. And guess what! The number was much higher than the amount they took out! Immigrants are good! We should open our doors!
This is not, of course, to say that this was the correct interpretation of data. It was certainly more correct, but at the bottom of the entire discussion was an assumption that everyone engaging in the debate implicitly agreed upon: a human’s presence in this country must be economically justified to be acceptable. That’s a moral opinion right there! And a fairly controversial one at that! One could argue that human life should not be reduced to its monetary value, and that it is ghoulish and weird to see other humans in terms of how many dollars you can wring out of them!
Data will not save you because there is a lot of it, too much to even comprehend sifting through, and by choosing which data is important, you are making a subjective choice.
When you choose to write about something, you are committing an act of bias
Even angling for “fairness” in reporting, journalists are committing an act of bias simply by choosing to report on something.
Say you're a reporter, working for the local newspaper. You have a couple of leads in front of you for your next story, but you can only pick one: The first is the story of a murder of a white woman by an immigrant. The second is the story of corporate bribery of government officials which resulted in the pollution of a nearby river.
Both of these stories are 100% true. They actually happened, and you'd be able to hunt down the Five W's (who, what, where, when, why), and report on them accurately.
Which one are you going to pick?
Your answer says something about your political preferences -- if you want stricter immigration laws, the murder story is the obvious choice, as it illustrates the consequences of what you see as weak immigration laws. If you care about the environment, or hate the influence that big money has over elected officials, the pollution story is the one for you.
But your choice also says something about your economic and professional incentives: The murder story has all the elements of a front-page headline. It will, as the Newsies would say, sell lots of papes. The masses love a good murder story, especially when there's a racial element to them, because it really gets their blood boiling.
The second story might be awful on a much larger scale, but it will likely not sell quite as much. People don't buy papes for ecological catastrophes and corruption like they do for murder (quoting the Newsies, once again, in regards to what makes a good headline: "How 'bout a crooked politician?" "Hey stupid, that ain't news no more!")
The pollution story will also probably be more labor intensive, because you'll be reporting unfavorably on powerful people who will have the incentive and the means to make life difficult for you. It will mean digging through piles of receipts, rather than interviewing sobbing relatives of the murdered beauty queen (yeah, I just made her a beauty queen, roll with it, this is my hypothetical). The pollution story may also lose your paper advertisers, political power brokers may cut off access to their offices in retaliation to your reporting, all of which will force your editor and publisher to make some hard decisions about whether the story you're writing is worth putting the entire paper in jeopardy.
At this point, even if you don't like the race-baiting element of the murder story, you may well take it. It's obviously the better career move.
This sounds like a ridiculously skewed hypothetical example, but it's not far off the calculus that reporters and their editors use to determine what to report on. Journalistic labor is limited, and publishing is a business. So more in-depth, harder-to-research stories often fall by the wayside in exchange for the tawdry "beauty slain by immigrant" story.
What can we as media consumers do?
The single best explanation of how the American media works is Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. Buy here. (Affiliate link)
There are some fairly disturbing implications for our democracy if there is no such thing as objectivity, but let's be honest: we all know what those implications are, because they have been part of our daily lives for years now. Large swaths of our country think that vaccines are putting microchips into their bloodstream, that the CIA used psychedelics to develop mind control techniques, and that the Democratic Party is actually an elaborate front for a ring of pedophiles.
The sheer amount of conspiracy theories and intentional disinformation out there makes it hard to know what's real anymore, because the world we live in is fucking insane, so all of that stuff sounds plausible. For one thing, the CIA did use psychedelics on unwitting Americans in an attempt to learn mind control — Google Project MK Ultra. And governments and corporations are tracking your every move, they’re just doing it through your phones and metadata, not through vaccine-administered microchips. And while all of us are out here laughing at QAnon for thinking that the Democratic Party is a pedophile ring, we all as a planet learned over the past 20 years that one of the most powerful and respected institutions in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, was basically an elaborate front for a ring of pedophiles.
Is that an exaggeration? Sure! If that helps you sleep at night! But the damage is done: the fact that all of these conspiracy theories seem to rhyme with the truth makes them easy for relatively sane people to swallow when they are twisted into something that’s Pizzagate levels of bonkers.
Which makes it that much more important for those of us that believe in democracy to be media literate. And we can’t do that if we keep viewing our preferred media sources as “objective” and everything else as “biased.”
What follows are a set of totally biased rules for better media consumption.
Rule #1: Stop looking for "unbiased" media and start looking for media that discloses its bias.
If a writer (or a news outlet) is honest, they will disclose their bias. Anyone claiming "objectivity" should be immediately suspect, because it means they are at best unaware of their own biases, and at worst actively misleading you.
If a writer or an outlet does not immediately disclose its bias, you can typically find out rather quickly by Googling them or, in a pinch, the owner of their publication. If the owner is a billionaire who dumps money into the election funds of liberals or conservatives, you'll have a good sense of what the publication is trying to promote. If the publication is run by a specific religious group or a political party, you'll know exactly what they are trying to do.
If you really want to go on a deep dive, look at their advertisers. Publications tend not to bite the hand that feeds them.
This does not mean individual reporters at a paper won't take a stand -- it just means they are taking a professional risk in doing so, and are putting their editors in an awkward position. After a while, you’ll start to identify reporters you trust, and you’ll seek their writing out when in doubt.
Rule #2: Identify your own bias, then get outside your comfort zone.
You should know what you believe in. You have moral preferences, and, like all human beings, are subject to cognitive biases.
Hands down one of the best rabbit holes to go down on the internet is Wikipedia's List of Cognitive Biases page. At the very least, you should know about confirmation bias, negativity bias, the framing effect, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
““Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.””
Cognitive biases aside, be aware that you have values, and these values influence what you believe. That's not an inherently bad thing! You can believe in curiosity, in kindness, in freedom, in equality, in beauty, and so on. All of these are admirable values, but your adherence to them will influence what types of information and stories you'll be attracted to.
One of the best ways to identify your own bias is to catch yourself when you’re reading something you totally agree with. If you're reading an article and are internally saying things like "Yes! Obviously! So true!" then it's probable that you're reading a bias that is in keeping with your own. If everything you read is something you totally agree with, guess what! You’re in a bubble! You should spend some time getting out of your comfort zone!
This does not mean you should start listening to InfoWars. If you know what your values are, guess what? You don’t have to read stuff that runs against them! I, for example, decided a while back (to be exact: when I was 12 and was watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time) that Nazis were bad. Now that I’ve made that decision: why would I read what a fascist has to say about anything? Why would I need “to get in their head”? If I’m looking for a viewpoint that’s different from my own to expand my worldview, I, a straight white man, could read a book by an indigenous person, by a trans woman, by a black man, by an immigrant, by a Dickensian street urchin, by literally anyone with a different experience than mine, to get a broader take on an issue.
When people say, “Oh, I watch Fox News to see what the other side is saying,” they don’t realize that a) there are way more than two sides, and that b) they are giving “the other side” a chance to work its propaganda on them. If all journalism is, at some level, propaganda, you need to be super judicious about which propaganda you expose yourself to. Why get into a Nazi’s head when you could get into the head of a Jew that fled them, an Italian communist who resisted them, or a Danish factory worker who sabotaged them? Your attention is a privilege — ask any toddler — and you should decide who is worthy of that privilege.
In my case, though I identify politically with the anti-authoritarian left, I will still read stuff written by more centrist liberals because I do believe we have basically the same values, even if I think they are entirely wrong in how they apply them. I’ll also go out of my way to read stuff by people who aren’t just straight white dudes like myself, people who have historically had less power. This can be extremely uncomfortable, given that most of the worlds oppressed people have been oppressed by, well, straight white dudes like myself. I’m still getting a diversity of views, I’m just not wasting any of my bandwidth on Ayn Rand or Tucker Carlson.
Rule #3: Be humble.
Once in a while, you are going to believe something that is wrong. Something that is demonstrably incorrect. Something that makes you look like a complete dumbass. When you find out: Don't panic! Think of the following things:
A lot of what you once learned as fact is now embarrassingly outdated. You are not stupid for still believing it, you've just been busy living life, falling in love, having kids, building a career, and occasionally experimenting with various funtime substances. You don't need to feel bad about living your life instead of constantly fact-checking the stuff you learned in high school.
Given our cognitive biases, the amount of misinformation out there, and the sheer limits of human perception and understanding, it is amazing that anyone is correct about anything ever. But through the simple act of seeking the truth, humans have split the atom, cured smallpox, and invented Dippin' Dots, the ice cream of the future. Truth is a journey, not a destination, and committing to the process rather than to a specific objective will make you feel a hell of a lot better about screwing up.
One bit of information that challenges your view of the world does not necessarily mean that your view of the world is entirely wrong. It just means you need to adopt a more nuanced worldview. And people who use words like "nuance" sound smart!
Remember what F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald was super smart! He wrote The Great Gatsby! By not rejecting inconvenient information, you are basically a cool Jazz-age guy holding a cocktail.
It is also worth noting that their are worldviews you can hold that allow you to become less dogmatic and more open to new thoughts and ideas, but that is for another article. In the meantime: humility in our thinking is a sign of intelligence, not stupidity.
Be more biased
The most insidious thing about the desire to be “unbiased” is that it often induces a state of complete moral spinelessness. In our insistence on “seeing both sides,” we can get lost in a haze of rhetoric and propaganda and never take a step back and say, “Hmm… The one side is a man with a boot on his neck. The other side is the man wearing the boot.” Most of us would like to imagine that, confronted with this reality, we’d maybe stop having lengthy conversations about the two different perspectives and we’d give the man with the boot a great big shove so he doesn’t kill the other guy.
To do that, of course, would mean the man with the boot would shout at us for being “biased.” Heaven forfend! My stars! Could there be anything worse than to be “unfair”?